James Musgrave

Dark Justice

As Seen in USA Today Talked about on "Authors on the Air" In this steampunk mystery, Jim Musgrave portrays late 19th century New York City with a horrifying yet comic vision of science gone awry. Detective Patrick O'Malley struggles with bizarre creatures and bawdy situations when he is pitted against steam-engineered pirates who aim to raid cargo ships and destroy lives. People breathe and release steam, fly out of windows and disappear, wield knives at lightning speed, and travel through time, but O'Malley also has a few tricks up his sleeve to help hold the dark forces back.

Steam City Pirates

Dark Stories for Readers with Surreal and Deep Tastes Hollywood and Broadway are icons of the American Dream. But what happens to those who feed off that dream? Just as drug cartels have many underlings, who must get paid along the journey to the addicts, so do the characters who need to be nourished by the luminaries who make up this star-studded world above us. James Musgrave's collection of eleven stories, in many ways, addresses the theme of "star power," but in a way that satirizes the stereotypical "Hollywood endings" in very unique and literary ways. This collection has a remedy for the past year's traumas caused by a worldwide pandemic. Award-winning short fiction author, Jacob M. Appel says, "With the publication of Valley of the Dogs, Jim Musgrave joins the ranks of George Saunders, Steven Millhauser, and Kevin Brockmeier at the heart of the modern American short story's second great renaissance." "Entering the consciousness of a reader is the most sacred enterprise an author can have. These stories have been collected as my Zen reflection during the past year's COVID-19 plague. This shamanistic mental state, which the Japanese term "Mushin," or "no-mind" is close to the stream-of-consciousness technique that Henry James, Virginia Woolf, Jack Kerouac, James Joyce, and William Faulkner used to such success. However, it is also a form of channeling that defies definition. This is the mystical realm that creatives around the world know so well, and we worship at its altar every day we put fingers to keys or pen to paper. I want to thank readers who enjoy dark stories, as in this age of political correctness and what publishers often term "accessibility," it is becoming more difficult for us authors, especially us authors who don't make a lot of money from our work, to find an audience. I will go out on a limb and say that if the author does make a lot of money from a dark story, he/she will get marketing to back him/her up to ride the tide of money to the bank. If you ride this wave of Gustav and all the other characters in my collection, then thanks for that. It's been a tough year for all of us. Bless you." --James Musgrave "If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking." ― Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood

Dark Stories

Valley of the Dogs

Razaq Raj

Sustainable management is an important consideration for businesses and organisations, and the enormous number of tourism events taking place requiring facilities, power, transport, people and much more makes sustainable event planning a considerable priority. By looking at mega events, sports events, conferences and festivals, this book uses best practice case studies to illustrate sustainable management issues and practical considerations that managers need to apply, providing an essential reference for researchers and students in leisure and tourism.

Event Management and Sustainability

Peter Robinson

Alexandra Kenyon

Using examples from the gamut of hospitality, this book explores issues around people, services and spaces. It covers management issues such as marketing, human resources, operations, quality management, facilities management, project management and strategy, while considering hospitality operations within their wider geo-social and geo-environmental settings. This book includes a range of important contemporary topics, such as sustainability, resilience and ethics; supported throughout by learning objectives, case studies, review questions, links to videos and further reading suggestions.

Managing Hospitality Experiences

It was my attempt in this story to affix a motive for this disaster. This narrator's motive is a complete and utter fabrication. However, as an author, I have always wondered what may be inside the mind of a person who can plan and execute such carnage. As a result, I used a medical tool to outline the steps during a person's descent into a schizophrenic state of mind. This process, as is the case with most human events, can happen suddenly, or, as in this instance, over many years. I have thus entitled each section of the descent in my narrator's story by the medical terms given at the end of the story in Conrad's Stage Model of Beginning Schizophrenia. I have also used a story framework taken from the Buddhist term "Bardo," which has been used before, most notably by author George Saunders, in his popular and award-winning novel, Lincoln in the Bardo. In my story, however, as you will see, the narrator has no moral conscience, as he has already become medically insane. Of course, since this man never survived, one can only speculate about what was going on inside his mind, and this is my attempt to do just that. As I am a believer of Buddhist and Hindu philosophy, I do not want my reader to misconstrue the fact that the narrator has employed such a philosophy and its terminologies/characters. He is, to use the literary terminology, an "untrustworthy" narrator.Finally, I have purposely left out the actual name of the perpetrator, even though most readers will instantly recognize him. I simply did not want to dignify him with a name. It's as simple as that. I used actual research from his life, and his experiences, and the gun purchase statistics at the end were provided by the FBI. These statistics speak for themselves, and one would hope readers might understand the underlying "problem" of gun control that is an integral part of my narrative.

James Musgrave

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